EVERYTHING'S BIGGER IN TEXAS!!!

I left Oklahoma City around 7am in the morning, anticipating a hot ride west. I got a couple of hours under my belt before the heat came up off the freeway and cooked us both, as usual. The ride was straightforward, uneventful and hot. On Momma Hen's insistence, I made the stop in Amarillo Texas on my way thru to New Mexico at this place they call The Big Texan. She told me I couldn't miss it, and she was right about that! Poor little Bomb looks dwarfed next to the bull in the top picture here. The place is painted a very in-ya-face bright yellow and blue, and its massive. You walk in the door and the first thing you find is that you're in the gift shop, which you have to pass alongside to get to the restaurant. Once in there, you can order a 72oz steak with all the trimmings and if you can eat it within an hour, you get it for free. I didn't even CONSIDER that, but I did treat myself to a lovely vanilla malt and a tall iced water. The interior of this place is like a big square ballroom, with railings all around the top floor area that skirts the sides, and the walls are filled with the heads of various deer, elk, ibix etc. Its a pretty cool place to hang out for a while and enjoy the air conditioning and the decor. I wasn't in a hurry to leave, and go back outside into the baking heat. I met a biker in there who recommended Tucumcari as a place to stop for the night, and as it was only another couple of hours or so away, I made for there, just really wanting to put that part of the desert behind me. I was relieved to get there, as I rode for a hundred straight miles, but what felt like 200, through a God-forsaken wilderness that stretched out as far as the eye could see in every direction, with nothing to punctuate it. No houses, no gas stations, just endless, boring, unrelieved desert. If it hadn't been Interstate 40 with plenty of traffic, I'd have been really concerned about my ability to get help if I broke down. As it was, the Bomb went onto reserve and I coughed into the first gas station over the border, just in the nick of time. So did a lot of other people, many of whom, like me, didn't realise it was a hundred miles between gas stations on that stretch of the freeway (often there's a sign to tell you that, but erm, not this time...), and that much distance is pretty much all my peanut tank will get me, including reserve. I joined the queue of ranting motorsists who were all in a state of unparallelled shock at how expensive the gasoline was in that place, and all pretty hacked off about being held to ransom. I guess with a captive market like that, they can charge what they like. Its just the fact that they were so unashamedly greedy with it that annoyed us all. Having to pay a little over the odds is expected, but not 35c a gallon more! I gassed up, tipped a bottle of cold water down my throat, soaked my bandana in water and put it back on my head, and pressed on for Tucumcari.

When I got there, late afternoon, I found the place to be a total AT&T Blackspot (God, that phone company is USELESS!!!!!!!) confirmed by the manager of the motel I eventually checked into after driving the length of the one-street town to see what was on offer. He was Mexican, and his English wasn't great, but he gave me a good room at a cheap rate (thirty bucks and worth every cent) and let me use his internet to send a couple of urgent emails. I parked up the Bomb, got unloaded and went for a leg-stretch wander back into the town to find food and an ATM. It felt good to walk. The payphone outside the local supermarket worked, so I called Mac to tell him where I was and get him to update the blog for me. Tucumcari doesn't have a cyber cafe, in fact it doesn't really have much of anything, but it was an interesting place to hang out for a night anyway. Just as I got to that payphone in the town, a tooth-jarring crack of thunder exploded in the air above me, and lightning split the sky BIGTIME, so I made a couple of calls, grabbed a shopping basket and did a record-breaking lap around the supermarket, and scurried back to the motel where I holed up with a couple of beers and a bag of shredded turkey and watched The War of the Worlds on HBO. It wasn't at all cold, but the storm was hard and heavy, so I snuggled down in bed to watch telly. There was a nice little pool at the motel, and I had been tempted to have a swim, until the storm swept on through, taking that idea right along with it. Tucumcari is on the old Route 66, and you can see by looking at it all that it was really quite special in its heyday. Unfortunately, most of the little stores, garages, soda houses etc are all derelict or boarded up now, and its a real shame, because I feel that New Mexico is sitting on a potential tourist opportunity of extraordinary proportions here, if they would only wake up and restore some of that stuff, before its too late. It felt a little sad, to me, and abandoned. Its a real shame to see so much history just falling into decay and literally dying where it stands, particularly for one such as myself, who just loved everything about that whole era in time. In my mind's eye I could picture all the little places open, neon lights flashing, rock and roll music playing from a jukebox in one of the soda houses, happy people spilling out into the streets, and old 50's cars rolling by. All very movie-romantic, I guess, but you could tell that it really had been like that at one time. That's what made me sad. Knowing how busy and thriving that little community had once been made it's current crumbling state all the worse. Still, in spite of that, it was a cool little place to hang for a night. I managed to get Cherry under cover, right under my motel room window, and all was well. Good job I like storms. I've certainly had a few goingon around me on this trip so far. Today was a good day. Long, but good. And if I win the American lottery and end up with six hundred million dollars, I'll buy Tucumcari, ressurect it to its 1950's glory, and turn it into a time warp for rockabillies just like me.